A boy was swept into the ocean. His story reveals the hidden danger of California’s sneaker waves
Upon reaching the bottom of the steps leading to Cowell Ranch State Beach, 8-year-old Siddhant Pruthi grabbed a fistful of sand and turned to his older brother, Arunay. Ahead lay the Pacific Ocean and an afternoon free of the pandemic’s confinements.
“
Dadabhai,” Siddhant said, addressing his 12-year-old brother with a Bengali term of endearment. “This is a bad beach.”
He was referring to the rocks in the sand, nothing more. The boys’ parents walked over to greet their cluster of friends camped near the base of a cliff. The tight-knit pandemic bubble of four families often met along the San Mateo County coast on weekends. This was the Fremont family’s first time at Cowell, a secluded cove south of Half Moon Bay.
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On April 23, the fifth whale in less than a month washed ashore in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. It was found near Fort Funston, according to the Associated Press, and as of this reporting, the cause of death on that particular whale has not been determined, but it’s likely it was hit by a ship.
Although the discovery of dead whales this time of year isn’t highly unusual, this number of them is. This is the time of year that is the beginning of the gray whale’s migration north, and California can be both a good place to see them and a bad place for boats to hit them. At the end of March and beginning of April, four dead whales were found in just nine days.
Whale Killed by Ship Fifth To Wash Up in San Francisco Waters in a Month
On 4/26/21 at 11:33 AM EDT
An endangered whale that washed up on a San Francisco shore last week probably died after being hit by a ship, researchers have concluded. It was the fifth whale death in the area in the past month.
The dead fin whale was first spotted at sea on Friday, April 23, by the U.S. Coast Guard. It landed near Fort Funston later that evening.
The cause of death was not immediately clear, but researchers from The Marine Mammal Center at the California Academy of Sciences and U.C. Santa Cruz said over the weekend the animal had suffered trauma to the neck, including bruising and bleeding to the muscle surrounding neck vertebrae, according to CBS Local.